For a long time, I have wanted to explore whether it might be possible to coexist and open oneself to the presence of the other — not only in the context of curatorial and artistic practices but in life in general — and what would be the attainable conditions of such an aesthetic, ethical and intellectual encounter. This continuing interest has brought me to imagine a curatorial practice that might initiate instances of connecting without fear or anxiety and give rise to, even if only fleeting, chances of being affected by this connection.

For me, everything always begins and ends with my two beams of hope for another kind of future, a future propelled by care and generosity: the first one is love, and the second one is my secret love affair with the writings of the poststructuralist feminist thinker and writer Hélène Cixous. Imagining the conditions of compassionate and hospitable togetherness-in-difference always takes me back to Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine; which directly translated means feminine writing. I have embarked on carrying the feminine of écriture féminine to the curatorial, although naturally the success of this transference cannot be guaranteed. I should note that the Cixousian feminine has nothing to do with the imagined essence of woman.1 The feminine must be understood here simply as a mode of encounter and action; an underlying ethos or ethics, if you will, driven by the principle of love.2 Since I’m painfully aware that speaking of love in the context of feminist discourse may be considered problematic, I should highlight that I do not speak of the social relation of love as the responsibility and essential tendency of woman. I speak of love, with and through Cixous’ writing, as the fuel of the feminine in order to insist on the potential of love as a world-shaking political force. I shall also emphasise that this idea of the feminine practice of curating is not concerned with (or restricted to) women curators, self-identifying feminist practitioners, women artists or feminist art but is, rather, a set of political and ethical principles outlining the circumstances of a social encounter in the context of curatorial practice. I would like to ask you to join me in imagining how weaving the feminine into the curatorial might pave the way for absolutely democratic curatorial practice; a practice of social encounters, creative imagination and production of meaning, which finds strength in openness to the other’s difference and alleviates our propensity for claiming territorial autonomy.

The Cixousian feminine operates against the phallocentric Symbolic, a prevailing system of thought and language within which our selves, lives and social relations are formulated. Phallocentrism, a term drawn from Jacques Derrida’s work, stands for the breadth and depth of a system that has built Western thought and culture upon the primacy of masculinity and the principle of sameness that privileges a single model of subjectivity which is constructed at the expense of any other category of being that might divert from it.3 The phallocentric Symbolic structures the world through continuous affirmation of difference and construction of borders within its own system of hierarchical categorisation.4 It makes sense of the world by establishing an infinite array of mutually exclusive binary opposites which render one concept of each binary couple superior to the other; e.g. active/passive, dominant/submissive, culture/nature, spirit/matter, self/other, subject/object…5 All superior concepts are labelled as desirable attributes representative of the self, whilst the inferior, undesirable concepts are marked as the attributes of the other. This binary structure, which allows no fluidity or ambiguity (in other words, no entity is allowed to contain two supposedly opposing qualities at once), is central to our identify formation. Identity is always constructed upon its constitutive outside: the self is formulated through a hierarchical, comparative relation to the other, who is also, by default, perceived as a threat to the autonomy and status of the self.6 This is why the self has an antagonistic urge to either control, subjugate or eradicate the other for the sake of self-preservation, whilst aspiring to remain entirely separate and self-contained.

Cixous refers to this mode of structuring difference and becoming a subject as masculine but this, of course, has nothing to do with defining the essence of man.7 For Cixous, these weighty terms – ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, each burdened with an elaborate assemblage of ideological connotations – are but linguistic tools indicating different libidinal registers within which we are capable of encountering the world, the other, and the world of the other.8 A subject operating in the masculine positions itself at the top within hierarchical oppositions whilst devaluing everything that it deems different or unfamiliar.9 What is of interest to us here, however, is Cixous’ proposition of the feminine as an alternative approach to subjectivity and identity construction: the feminine not as a discipline of evaluative divisions like the masculine, but as a force of generative convergence and polyphonic coexistence. The feminine enables plurality and unpredictable alterability: instead of maintaining territories and borders, it incites movement across categorical boundaries. A subject operating in the feminine does not seek to antagonistically contain or abolish the other – in order to preserve itself, may I add – but accepts the other’s movements, listens to the other’s voice, cares for the other and also recognises its own being as a composition of several others – or traces of others – within itself.10 The urgent question is whether we can mobilise the feminine as a political force releasing us from the phallocentric trap of binary oppositions, and as a key to coexisting and co-creating a new social life with a living, equal other. We must acknowledge, after all, that the articulation of this proposal itself is already contributing to the prevailing binary structure.

Artist, theoretician and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger has envisaged the possibility of productive coexistence through psychoanalysis and asserted that it is possible to perceive difference in a non-phallic way without hostility or antagonism. Ettinger’s theory of matrixial trans-subjectivity and feminine structuring of difference subverts the supposed inevitability of a polarising encounter between the I and the not-I by viewing social relations – as well as our relation to other beings and objects – as a horizontal, affective web. This web consists of clusters of psychic resonance fields, matrixial borderspaces, within which the self and the other can emphatically attune with, encounter and transform one another by sharing and exchanging psychic traces through mental and affective strings. Ettinger refers to this process of co-transformation as metramorphosis.11

Ettinger’s proposition mirrors – and stems from her theorisation of – the prenatal and prematernal relation between the unborn child and the mother-to-be. She perceives pregnancy as an aesthetic and ethical relation of hospitality and compassion, in which both the presubject (I) and the m/other (not-I) change in different but related ways; the subject co-emerges in difference with an uncognised but intimate, co-affecting other.12 Even though, this early matrixial alliance breaks at birth and the infant is then forced to adapt to – and become a social subject amongst – the polarising and self-preserving object relations of the world, the prenatal connectivity marks us with a psychological inscription. This is to say that whilst the phallocentric Symbolic, to which we become accustomed, might be the predominant register in which we interact with the surrounding world, our capacity to access the matrixial resonance fields is never entirely obliterated.13 Should we open ourselves to it, we can discover within ourselves a profound longing for matrixial connectivity, which enables us to attune to the other postnatally, and to welcome subjectivising transformations ignited by this connection even after we have reached the state of subjecthood. For Ettinger, the subject is never solid and fully formed but, as a node in the matrixial web, always remains malleable in the presence of the released potential of the other.14

Ettinger writes: ‘Freeing the potentiality of an other while being transformed by it too is a kind of love – an ethical co-birthing in beauty.’15 Fundamentally, then, the metramorphic encounter-events between two or more subjects in the matrixial borderspace are rooted in deep solicitude and affection. During these encounters, we courageously transgress our individual psychic boundaries16 and produce knowledge with the other, of the other and of the other within ourselves. Ettinger has named this co-creative potentiality and co-production of knowledge copoiesis and perceives artistic practice as a crucial trigger for copoietic processes.17 Although Ettinger stresses that these processes do not depend on intention nor conscious communication, perhaps we can join Griselda Pollock in contending that this primordial capacity, and even desire, for metramorphosis and copoiesis can also be activated as a deliberate political action towards compassion, solidarity and democracy.18

Cixous' écriture féminine could be interpreted as one mode of creative practice seeking to activate this capacity. It is through this practice of writing that Cixous performatively imagines, and thus activates, an alternative ethical relation and a new mode of expression. A systematically structured text, which amounts to a logical linear argument with a clear beginning and a resolved ending, is what Cixous identifies as a product of masculine practice of writing. While a masculine text has a single authoritative voice, which intends to fully master and (reductively) contain its subject, a feminine text does not dissect or rationalise in order to reach the heights of simplified comprehensibility. Écriture féminine allows its subject to flow and circulate through letters and punctuations freely, and welcomes its subject in full with all of its potentialities and multidimensional intricacies. It has no end or closure but, rather, it starts over and over ‘on all sides at once’.19 Emanating from the discordant voices, unpredictable articulations and diverse experiences of the self and several others, feminine writing is ambiguous, polyphonic, accepting of contradiction and, hence, unforeseeable.20

I would like us to consider the others, to whom Cixous alludes as she speaks of writing, as those countless others within the self, and écriture féminine as an inward exploration of the unreleased and infinite potential of the writing subject. She writes: ’When I write, all those that we don’t know we can be write themselves from me, without exclusion, without prediction, and everything that we will be calls us to the tireless, intoxicating, tender-costly-search for love. We will never lack ourselves.’21 Perhaps this generous and loving care for the self can then be turned outwards, towards the others around, not only within, the subject. This turning point – which should be possible if we align ourselves with Ettinger’s idea of matrixial connectivity – is crucial in transferring the feminine to the curatorial because curating, as opposed to writing, must be seen primarily as a social practice. What follows is that, if écriture féminine is a mode of open-ended creative practice which includes and welcomes being affected by the presence and perspective of intrapsychic others, curating ‘in the feminine’ may instigate flexible frameworks for co-occupying space in dialogue and coexisting with others in a non-hierarchical social relation. The curator who practices in the feminine must welcome a similar principle of alterability and reach beyond the existing self, but these transformations are triggered by encounters and exchanges with other practitioners, publics and works of art.

As Cixous describes the feminine which accepts the other attentively, generously and with care, like Ettinger, she strives towards a notion of love. Distinguishing what she considers as the phallocentric conception of love – a narcissistic struggle for mastery and possession – from the other love which she seeks, Cixous states: ‘The new love dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention.’22 She describes an ability to embrace, or ‘to watch-think-seek’,23 the otherness of the other without feeling endangered by difference. Thus, love is a leap of faith into the unknown, which can trigger an affective met(r)amorphosis within the self. In resonance with Cixous’ and Ettinger’s ideas, Lauren Berlant has stated that what makes love an interesting political concept is that love is one of the very few instances in which people want to become different.24

Imagining this act of reaching beyond the self in a social setting, without fear of difference and contradiction, has lead me to consider Judith Butler’s Hegelian take on the dynamic of love. Butler argues that love means dispossession of the self, and displacement of logic and purely subjective thought. For Butler, love is a generative dynamic which evolves in time between living, equal subjects and operates as a sequence of irreconcilable statements which inexhaustibly contest one another.25 This idea echoes that of Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt, who interpret love as the rupturing of sovereignty. Hardt explains: ‘If we were to think of the sovereign as the one who decides, in the social relation of love there is no one who decides.’26 He also speaks of love as a cooperative process between several subjects that operates like a social muscle; it requires continuous training through which its power increases in time.27 This training could be understood as the experience of contradiction, reversibility and infinite changeability, which Butler describes as the ultimate defining feature of love. She writes:

If [love] can be described, it is only through the shifts of perspective, and through some way of grasping, or gathering, those various shifts. They imply one another, and it is only by undergoing these shifts and displacements that we can hope to enact and thus know love itself.28

Butler speaks of this dynamic of love simultaneously as a possibility in a social relation and a structuring force of Hegel’s writing. I would like to suggest that applied to the context of curatorial practice, this dynamic can occur simultaneously as a creative and social force.

Cixous argues that the fundamental aim of écriture féminine is to surpass the phallocentric paradigm, and that it can only be exercised by those who desire to unsettle the status quo.29 Employing Chantal Mouffe’s vocabulary, feminine curatorial practice alongside écriture féminine can then be described as a counter-hegemonic practice, challenging the masculine politics of expressing ideas and producing meaning through streamlined, goal-driven productivity and construction of clean arguments. Mouffe’s vision of agonism is also central to the way in which opening up to the other, coexistence in difference and co-occupation of space in dialogue could be realised in a non-hierarchical social formation. When Mouffe describes ‘the political’ as the dimension of conflict constitutive of all social life, she states that there is an element of antagonism in all relations between human subjects, often articulated through the binaries of ‘we’ and ‘they’ or the self and the other. As she imagines radical liberal democracy as a framework for coexistence, she argues that the most essential function of democracy is to formulate such relations in a new way, not by eradicating the antagonistic dimension entirely but by transforming it into agonism.

As opposed to antagonism – hostile opposition of an ‘enemy’ who must not be listened to – agonism indicates coexistence with the other in conflict and a capacity to acknowledge the validity of the other’s position; a relation of equal difference and mutual listening which does not lead to the abolishment of the other.30 If in the prevailing order of hierarchical dualisms the relationship between ‘we’ and ‘they’ is always that of ‘they believe, we know’ – as Isabelle Stengers has suggested31 – perhaps in the feminine, which manifests through the dynamic of love, the subject can welcome the possibility or likelihood that the self might also believe, and the other know. Through responding to the unpredictable declarations, movements and needs of the other, subjective conditions of thought can be challenged as the borders of individual territories rupture. I would like to interpret Mouffe’s proposition as one approach to what Pollock describes as a politically conscious action towards fostering metramorphic and copoietic processes. Perhaps, then, the agonistic model re-articulated concurrently with the political notion of love could work as a foundation for envisaging a curatorial and artistic space of thinking and making together which operates in the feminine register and can release the co-creative potentiality of compassionately connecting with the other.

I am not suggesting that, in the context of a feminine curatorial endeavour, the dialogue amongst curators, artists, artworks, audience and others would result in everyone and everything becoming part of a synchronous choir and speaking in the same voice. Pollock has emphasised in her account of Ettinger’s proposition of the matrix as an alternative model of structuring difference, that matrixial connectivity has nothing to do with fusion. On the contrary, the subjects entering the matrixial process of durational co-transformation and co-emergence will always remain profoundly different.32 Perhaps it is appropriate to relate this to Mouffe’s argument: in agonism, despite the fact that each party in conflict acknowledges the legitimacy of the other’s position, the conflict has no universally rational or moral solution in consensus, which could be achieved through exhaustive negotiation. This means, that arriving at a particular decision or outcome in the realm of politics, for instance, never means that everyone implicated in that decision would become ideologically unified as a group.33 Butler states similarly that the phenomenon of love as an endless chain of shifts in perspective remains always ‘defined by its indefinite openness’ due to an everlasting conflict in the encounter between subjects.34

There are recurring arguments made against focusing on ‘the binary couple’, which manifests not only in Cixous’ and Derrida’s deconstructive strategies but also in Butler’s description of love and Mouffe’s approach to the political dimension of social life. Some have noted that since deconstruction refuses to transcend the binary couple by denying the position of the master-who-knows and fails to offer ‘the third’ to the couple as a route out of binary thinking, it is bound to remain politically impotent in a self-inflicted phallocentric trap.35 I hope that you can nevertheless humour me, whilst I briefly try to convince you of the absolute necessity to acknowledge the prevalence of the couple in phallocentric language and culture. For Cixous, the possibility of change in how we become subjects and, thus, social beings is profoundly tied to language which, as we know it, operates according to the principles of phallocentric binaries. What she wrote over three decades ago still stands: it is only through our awareness of ‘the couple that makes it all work’ that we can deconstruct culture and demand ‘a complete transformation in the relation of one to the other.’36 In other words, it is by explicitly centring our social, political and cultural struggle upon the binary that we can discover new ground for re-articulating and restructuring of how we live and interact with one another as well as imagining the other love, which is not simply a battleground in disguise.

It is necessary to keep in mind that the dynamic of love, which I interpret as a political force and associate with the feminine, does not manifest as a hopeless deadlock. Jacques Derrida’s carefully articulated description of a dialogue might serve us best to describe what happens in the proposed mode of love operating in the feminine register: the words and phrases that we articulate together always form multiple angles which intermittently contest, interrupt and circulate one another, leading us to untrodden sidetracks. These unfamiliar terrains are where, I believe, we can open ourselves to the compassionate discovery, and it is in this way that encountering the other in love is always productive despite the focus on the couple. In the manner of Ettinger and Pollock, Hardt has specified with Antonio Negri that love is not a process of unification or fusion, nor repetition of the same, but ‘should be defined, instead, by the encounters and experimentation of singularities in common, which in turn produce a new common and new singularities.’37 Love is, therefore, an ontological event not only creating new objects but also establishing new ways of living and interacting with one another.38 This is what is at the root of my attempt at feminine curatorial practice: not merely the production of new objects and new ideas in a radically democratic setting, but a space for imagining a new kind of social life and new ways of being and making together as a multidimensional composition of singularities. (Perhaps this is my attempt at radical social imaginary?)

Although my attempt to communicate the ideological foundations of and the political motivations behind feminine curating is wildly abstract, I would like to bring our attention to the vital importance of material bodies and physical spaces to the feminine register. Ettinger’s theory of the matrix, for example, is rooted in the corporeal and aesthetic experience of prenatal and prematernal connectivity. However, the others to whom Ettinger aspires and encourages us to attune also extends the realm of living beings to equally consider inanimate objects as others loaded with their own affective frequencies; a kind of life. Such objects, of course, include works of art, to the very materiality of which the artist has transferred her psychic traces.39 Cixous, too, emphasises the significance of bodies and matter. Écriture féminine denies the phallocentric division between the mind and the body, and culture and nature. Instead of following the masculine aspiration to reach transcendental abstraction, which steers away from the body in preference of spirituality, Cixous invites us to write from and through our bodies.40 The feminine always stems from and operates within the limits of the physical body and locality of the subject and, as Rosi Braidotti has summarised Cixous’ line of thought, envisages ‘a new world-view where all living matter is a sensitive web of mutually receptive entities.’41

To Braidotti, the Cixousian feminine is in accordance with Deleuze’s notion of radical immanence.42 This is to say that Cixous acknowledges and draws our attention to the myriad material and relational conditions specific to the locality and temporality of the embodied subject.43 I would like to suggest, then, that we envisage feminine curating as a politically driven, radically immanent practice, which recognises these situated spatio-temporal conditions as the starting point from which to pursue social change. If the curator operates in the feminine and seeks to imagine new ways of structuring the relationship between the self and the other through her practice, which is grounded in both social relations and our relationships with objects, she has to – instead of establishing grandiose claims and narratives – begin from reconsidering the ethics of the most intimate interactions and processes of producing meaning and knowledge that compose our everyday life. We cannot effectively tackle questions of social and economic inequality, injustice or violence on a larger scale until we have established the kind of small-scale democratic social institutions, which allow us to experiment with new ways to live, interact and love as Hardt and Berlant propose. As befits the notion of immanence, however, these situated experiments, which might take us closer to the other, can never be universalised into a single transcendental formula. Rather, each iteration has to be negotiated with a multiplicity of voices in an ever-changing dialogue.44

Cixous describes the subject writing in the feminine register as the one who discovers and produces the new:

She lets the other language speak - the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. […] she doesn't defend herself against these unknown women whom she's surprised at becoming, but derives pleasure from this gift of alterability.45

If the curator aspires to harness this ethos of the feminine text, it would mean to include the presence and perspective of the several others – whether this means artists, artworks or publics – with whom the curator works at all stages of production and construction of ideas. Curating in the feminine must require a type of non-egotistic sensibility and the ability to let one’s ideas evolve in the hands of others without concerns for sole authorship. Even if the curator might assume the role of an instigator, this will not make her a sovereign leader, but simply the one vocalising the first declaration in a loving exchange, from which a chain of responses may begin generating shifts in and multiplication of individual perspectives.

I have been asked how all of this would play out in practice and some have wondered whether such an approach could be at all considered in the context of curatorial practice, which finds its purpose in processes of selection, ordering and making sense. I’d like to suggest that multidimensional and nonlinear arguments as well as democratically negotiated, collaborative compositions are processes of selection and meaning production, too. Of course, it goes without saying that the presence of several discordant voices does not lend itself to logical progression of arguments, clean cut resolutions or fast results. Instead, curating in the feminine must be seen as a durational practice, which requires long-term relationship building prone to disruption of prevailing assumptions and common sense. It must be envisaged as a practice in which the co-emergence of multiple perspectives occurs over time within a horizontal social formation which deems all contributions, conflicting or otherwise, equally valuable. Whilst discussing non-sovereignty as characteristic to love, Hardt and Berlant pose the practical question of how decisions can be made at all in such a relation. Although this question has no set answer per se, in order to avoid mere chaos in convergence, it is necessary to establish a set of norms or habits as a format to which each party involved can ground their exchanges.46 As Jo Freeman concludes in her analysis of the social structures within feminist activist groups, practicing radical democracy always requires a set of appropriate formal structures and their constant re-examination. This is to guarantee everyone’s equal position in shared spaces and dialogue in which exchange of knowledge, skills or other resources and processes of consequential decision-making take place.47

I should add that there is no standardised recipe for any kind of feminine creative practice in general. For Cixous, it is essential that manifestations of écriture féminine cannot be reductively defined or theorised as an established set of recurring motifs, and then confined into a fixed category.48 You may have just caught yourself wondering: ‘Is that not exactly what you have set out to do?’ However, whilst I have outlined the goals and principles of the feminine – those of love, compassion, democracy and immanence – I have refrained myself from binding this proposition to any kind of curatorial content, style or format. Instead of considering the feminine as a prescribed model for collaboration, participation, education or exhibition-making, we should sense its presence as a gently subversive undercurrent, which can be at work and traced in any practice that in one way or another provides grounds for producing knowledge with and of the other. In fact, rather than being understood as one particular kind of practice, as a creative approach that advocates transgression of categorical divisions, feminine curating could be more understandably considered as an openness to interdisciplinary experimentation and changing formats – a central aspect of Cixous’ demonstration of feminine writing, too, is her own attempt to undo the gap between theory and poetry. If I were to try and capture at all what I imagine curating in the feminine to mean, I would describe it as an ethics and sensibility which stems from an adoring affinity without an impulse to possess or contain; a genuine desire to approach, stay with and transform in the presence of the other.